London-based children's author Jessica Spanyol has been on a tear with her Minibugs series, and it's nice to see a talented artist and author with such a light and quirky touch get so much support from a publisher - I've spotted seven in this series released in the last sixteen months. Each colorful, hardcover 7x6" Minibugs book features a bug and his or her eccentric vehicle in a community where bugs populate each others' books but take turns with starring roles.

Echoes of Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go are so strong here Spanyol often seems to revel in self-aware tribute, but she is never derivative; she has digested a book that launched a genre, spinning it back out as something all her own. Like Scarry's seminal work, each character in Spanyol's Minibugs series has exactly one personal trait that is crucially expressed in their highly customized vehicle and occupation. Spanyol's language is clumsy in that strange, self-aware manner possible only in children's books, where audiences take words literally and construct meaning from them like building blocks, freeing an author up to use all of the literal locutions and verbal mortar that a good edit could easily remove, along with some of the fun. The author also makes frequent use of excitement-generating phrases like "Go go go!" that draw parents and children alike into the action and give the books a sense of dynamic action that is at once totally alien to and perfectly suited to the reading of a book about someone driving a car.

If these books will get your child's engine revving, the covers alone will tell you. They sell for $6 apiece on Amazon. If not, try one of Spanyol's quieter, and subtler, Carlo the giraffe books for toddlers and young preschoolers. - Jeremiah